Google Engineer Charged with $1.2 Million Insider Trading Scheme on Polymarket

Federal prosecutors in New York have charged Michele Spagnuolo, a 36-year-old staff information security engineer at Google, with using confidential company data to place highly profitable bets on Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based prediction market platform. According to a criminal complaint unsealed Wednesday, Spagnuolo allegedly accessed Google's internal search data to learn the results of the company's Year in Search 2025 before they were publicly announced, then used this information to trade prediction contracts under the username "AlphaRaccoon," netting approximately $1.2 million in profits.

Spagnuolo's scheme relied on his legitimate access to Google's internal systems, which he misused to obtain nonpublic information about the most-searched person in 2025. The complaint alleges that he correctly predicted D4vd (a singer) would be Google's most-searched person when the market had assigned "near-zero probability" to that outcome. Shortly after Google publicly announced its Year in Search results on December 4, 2025, the AlphaRaccoon account realized substantial gains across multiple related prediction markets, including contracts about television shows and other individuals. Prosecutors state that Spagnuolo then took deliberate steps to conceal the unlawful source of his profits.

Spagnuolo, an Italian citizen, was arrested Wednesday morning in New York and appeared before a federal magistrate judge. He was released on a $2.25 million bond, secured by $1 million in cash with $50,000 required to be posted immediately. He faces multiple charges including commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering, and has not yet entered a plea. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has separately filed civil insider trading charges against him.

Google stated it is cooperating with law enforcement and acknowledged that while Spagnuolo had legitimate access to marketing materials through an employee tool, using confidential information for trading constitutes a serious policy violation. The company placed him on administrative leave pending further action. Polymarket commended its own cooperation with regulators, stating it is the only prediction market platform in the United States whose collaboration has led to insider trading prosecutions.

This case represents the second major insider trading prosecution involving Polymarket in recent months. In April 2026, U.S. Army Special Forces Master Sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke pleaded not guilty to similar charges after allegedly using classified military information about a covert operation against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to generate over $400,000 in trading profits on the platform.